


After the Fact

by hetzi_clutch



Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Character Death, F/F, Gen, Sadness, Sorry guys, but I was PROMPTED, dont kill me please
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-07
Updated: 2019-09-05
Packaged: 2020-02-27 19:39:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18745744
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hetzi_clutch/pseuds/hetzi_clutch
Summary: Impossible things come to pass, sometimes.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> If you don’t read the tags, I’m sorry. Also I can’t be blamed for this.

At first they don’t even notice she’s dead. 

They’ve moved onto Saturdays now, the three of them. Yaz wants to keep her job, and Ryan has studying to do, and Graham decides, after a while, that he’d like to enjoy the peace that comes with retirement. The Doctor doesn’t love it, they can tell, but she never says a word. And if their adventures grow just a tad more tailored, as if she’s trying, in her own subtle way, to make a case, none of them mention it. Wouldn’t be polite, and they are, after all, English.

Then one Friday, the TARDIS comes back, and sits.

It’s not an unusual occurrence in itself; it’s the only time the Doctor is early for anything, actually. Usually she parks outside Yaz’s flat and brings herself up for tea, regardless of whether Yaz is rushing out the door. And almost always, Yaz stays.

This time, Yaz catches the TARDIS out of the kitchen window as she’s washing up for breakfast, and grins. She’s got a shift in half an hour, but she puts the kettle on again, and takes two new mugs out of the cabinet.

The Doctor doesn’t come.

Yaz waits until the last possible moment, then glances at her watch and sighs. Probably doing repairs, she thinks. And it’s too late now, anyway; she’s got fifteen minutes to get to the station, and she’s already running late.

She passes the TARDIS on her way out and almost knocks, but a glance at her watch stays her hand. Odds are, she’ll get home and the Doctor will be in her flat, making a terrible meal.

She’s not in her flat, either, when Yaz gets back.

“Okay,” she sighs, and takes off her police hat, running her fingers over her plaited hair. “This definitely means she’s trying to fix the chameleon circuit again.”

She tosses her hat on the table next to to door and turns on her heel, a reprimand already forming on her lips. It’s not like the Doctor needs to hear it, because she won’t listen, but Yaz is pretty sure she likes to hear it anyway. A joke, a reminder. 

_(“You don’t need to meddle in everything,” Yaz had once told her._

_“Oh but Yaz,” the Doctor had said, removing her burnt fingers from her mouth to answer her properly, “If I don’t, who will?”)_

She knocks once, which is usually all it takes, and when there’s no answer, frowns and pushes the doors open. They come easily, which is a surprise, because only a beat later she remembers she forgot her key. And the TARDIS is dark, only the console glowing softly, a soft hum that permeates through the floor and the walls. It’s different from her normal burbling sounds.

Yaz doesn’t like it.

Her frown deepens as she approaches the console, and when she gets there she leans over it, pressing her hands against the edge. 

“Doctor?” She calls, half-expecting a head to pop up from an open panel in the floor, a welding mask to slide back, a cheery grin to emerge.

There’s no answer. 

“Doctor?” She calls again, and for the first time, unease runs through her. She feels the TARDIS hum under her touch, and almost pulls her hands away, because there’s something off to it, unnatural. A shudder, though there’s no movement. 

A cry, silent. 

“Where is she?” She asks, swallowing the sudden panic in her throat, because _it’s fine, the Doctor’s just in trouble, we need to get her out of it,_ and reaches up to tap a screen. She’s not sure why, but it doesn’t matter; nothing happens.

The TARDIS stays, aggravatingly, silent.

She begins to move around the console, because she has to do something, she’s a police officer for God’s sake. When she gets halfway to the other side she finds a welding mask. The Doctor’s welding mask, specifically, and a few tools scattered across the ground, as if she’d just gotten up and left. Probably, she had. If an alarm had blared—Yaz can see it in her mind’s eye, and she closes her eyelids against it. Fear is thumping dully in her chest, and she doesn’t even know for what.

“Listen,” she says, and jabs her finger at the console. She doesn’t think it is. “You want us to help her, yeah? Then you have to _tell us what’s wrong.”_

There’s no answering beep, like the kind she’s heard so often in response to the Doctor’s murmured assurances. Only a deep silence, and an anxious hum which Yaz still doesn’t quite understand.

She leans back and breathes in, trying to quell her frustration. _It’s no use,_ she thinks, _to get mad at a machine._ Even one who might actually have some sort of consciousness.

“Okay,” she says after a moment’s collection. “Is she on the TARDIS?”

There’s no obvious answer, but under her hands, she can hear a negative hum deep within the console. 

“Right,” she mutters, and nods, because it feels good to make some motion, feels like she’s taking action. “So what can we do, then?”

No answer.

Yaz stares at the TARDIS for a long moment. Then she steps back and releases a sigh, one that comes from deep within her chest. She’s hoping it will bring up all the fear, the dread sitting at the bottom of her stomach. It doesn’t.

“I’m not good at waiting,” she says to the TARDIS, and it makes no reply. “But she’s going to come back, isn’t she?”

Nothing. Yaz touches the console, feels that hum deep within the ship, and her stomach drops. She ignores the sensation.

“Right.” She steps back again, and brushes off her uniform, though there’s nothing to brush off, because she’s not sure what to do with her hands. “Guess we’ll just have to wait, won’t we?”

————

They wait, and nothing happens.

Yaz phones Ryan and Graham immediately, and they come to visit the TARDIS as well, and demand answers they don’t get. They search the rooms, and come up with nothing, only a locked blue door they’ve never seen before. Even Ryan, with his newly-acquired mechanical knowledge, can’t get it open. They don’t try very hard, anyway.

The Doctor wouldn’t want them prying, is the general unspoken consensus.

Weeks pass, then months. The bright blue paint of the TARDIS starts to fade. Yaz notices one day when she passes by for work, that a long flake of paint is drooping from one of the doors, just beside the sign that says _Phone For Assistance._ She inspects the box, and finds five others similar.

The next Saturday, her and Graham and Ryan are out with a bucket of paint matched exactly to the TARDIS’s color, and they paint over the entire thing in careful swoops, until it looks just as shiny and new as the first time they’d seen.

Two months later, it starts fading again.

They do the same again, and then again, and it’s only after the third time they stand out there, paint bucket in hand and a spare week after the previous Saturday, that Ryan voices what they’re all thinking. 

“It’s dying,” he says, and both Graham and Yaz look sharply to him. He catches their eyes, and shrugs. “Isn’t it? I mean it’s not a real police box. It’s doing this for a reason.”

“Yeah, but—“ Yaz looks to the blue doors, which are already starting to crack and peel, and feels something crack inside her own chest. “We’ve got to keep it in good condition, don’t we? Until the Doctor gets back.”

And she knows what they’re thinking, because she’s thinking it herself, but they don’t say anything. Instead they look to each other, and shrug, then Ryan hoists the paint bucket and Graham grabs a brush, and together they step forward and begin their work. Yaz follows a moment later, swallowing a lump in her throat she doesn’t want to acknowledge.

Two days later, it’s peeling.

Yaz feels it when the TARDIS goes dark. Or, she doesn’t feel it exactly, but she jolts up in bed one night, heart pounding, then tears back her covers and flies to the window. She can just barely make out the shape of the TARDIS in the darkness, sitting stolid on the same concrete stoop it arrived at, nearly a year before. From her view, nothing has changed.

Yaz nearly falls over herself putting on shoes and a jacket, and when she falls out into the hallway, she runs.

The doors open just as easily as they did the first time, all those months ago. She pushes inside and goes straight for the console, and and her heart drops because there’s no light. No light glowing dim from deep inside, and when she strains her ears, she can barely make out a hum.

She thrusts her hand onto the console as if that’ll do something, and nearly collapses in relief when a faint vibration threads through her fingertips.

“You’re alive.” She almost laughs the word with relief. “You’re alive, thank god, I thought—“

And the terrible thought floats behind her eyes, but she pushes it away, because it’s not true. The hum is there, weak but there, and it almost feels as if it’s fading but she _knows_ that can’t be happening, can’t be real. “You have to stay alive, you know. You can’t fade out, yeah? You have to stay alive, for when she comes back—“

There’s no answering vibration, and she trails off, because for a moment she’d thought the hum had stopped completely. Her fingers scrabble at the edge of the console, desperate, and her palm presses against the dashboard, and then she almost sags in relief, because it’s _still there._

But it’s fading.

“Hey,” she says angrily, and digs her palms against the dashboard, pressing until her wrists crack. “Hey, what are you doing? You can’t go and leave her, don’t you want her to fix you? You can’t fade out on me, you can’t—“

She cuts off abruptly, because there’s no response. No response, and she’s pressing her palms as hard as she can into the surface, her hands trembling from the effort, and there’s nothing. No light emanates from the console, and the dashboard is silent beneath her fingertips.

Yaz stares without seeing. Slowly, she pulls her hands away from the console, and tucks them across her chest. She’s trembling, she notices, though it’s not particularly cold. There’s a realization tugging at her, and she knows what it is, and doesn’t want to face it. Not now, not here. Not anywhere.

She moves around the console, numb, then stops when something clinks against her shoe. She looks down, and it’s the Doctor’s welding mask, scattered next to her tools. They’d never moved them, never even touched them. Doing so felt wrong, somehow. Disrespectful. She wasn’t sure why.

She thinks she knows, now.

Slowly, with shaky movements, she lowers herself to the floor and sits cross-legged. The welding mask she places on her lap, and stares at it, and tries to accept the thing she knows she should accept, but she can’t. It’s too big, too impossible. It doesn’t make sense, and there’s a lot of things in the universe that don’t make sense, but this can’t be one of them. 

“You were early though,” she says to the welding mask, which of course makes no response. “You were early, and I thought—“

She doesn’t continue the sentence. The welding mask stares at her, and she sees her own reflection in the glass plate over the eyes. Suddenly, she snatches it up, and cradles it to her chest, and since she’s already half-leaning up against the console, she leans back all the way under, hidden from any possible view, and finally gives way to tears.

She cries for fifteen minutes, and then she calls Ryan and Graham, and they listen with a silence which tells her they’ve accepted it long ago. She arranges to meet them outside the TARDIS, and when they come, she’s sort of dry-eyed and still clutching the welding mask like it’s a security blanket. She greets them right in front of the doors, and she’s stupidly relieved to catch the redness around their eyes as well.

“Hey Yaz.” Graham gives her an empty grin. “You alright, love?”

She shrugs, and tries to smile back. “I don’t think so, Graham.”

“Yeah.” He doesn’t say anything more than that, but his eyes fall to Ryan, who’s staring at the TARDIS doors, his jaw tight and his eyes bright.

“You alright, son?”

Ryan doesn’t answer. Slowly, his eyes roam over the TARDIS, and without looking at them, he says, “What do we do with her?”

He gestures towards the doors, but they both know what he means. Yaz tightens her grip on the welding mask. She’s scared, stupidly, of letting it go.

“I think we should look after her,” she says after a long moment. “Take care of her. It’s what she would have wanted, right?”

Graham’s smile cracks around the edges. He looks at the TARDIS wistfully. “Even if it’s not, I think we have to, don’t we?”

“Yeah.” Ryan nods, and his voice spells a finality that brooks no argument. “It’s what we do. Together.”

“Together,” Yaz echoes. The wind catches the word, trailing it away, and as she watches a flake of paint pushes off the front door and flutters to the ground. Silence settles over the three, and for a good few minutes, they just stand there. A million things hang in the air, a million words. 

They don’t say anything.

Some things don’t need saying, anyway.


	2. Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> rip me ever looking things over twice but THANKS SARA
> 
> idk where this came from (hamilton).

She spends years.

But not at first.

At first, she doesn’t know what to do with herself. She wanders around life in a haze, bouncing from one thing to the other, jerking out only to fend off her mother’s worried disapproval. She stays on the force for two years, then quits because she can’t take it anymore.

It’s not that she doesn’t want to do good. It’s just that she can’t shake the feeling that she’s missing something.

The TARDIS sits outside her flat block, and she suppresses a shudder every time she passes it. It’s the kind that rolls down her spine, sends her whole body at unease, because it feels  _ wrong _ ; the TARDIS, alone, with no Doctor to fill it. Not even a body.

How, Yaz wonders, can they remember her without a body?

Of course, the Doctor never put much stock in bodies. She claimed she’d had twelve prior, and would move on to another eventually, though Yaz never got to confirm how or why that didn’t happen. She’d asked her once, in a roundabout way, what happened to those bodies, those twelve other men— _ men _ —and the Doctor had simply shrugged.

“They’re gone, I suppose,” she’d said, with just the barest hint of an uncomfortable pause. It was enough to make Yaz draw back, slightly. 

“Gone as in dead?” she’d asked. She shouldn’t have pressed on, maybe, but she couldn’t resist. Yaz had always had an issue with curiosity, a desire to see things all the way through. 

The Doctor paused, thoughtful, then shrugged. “In a way, maybe. But they live on in my head, too. I remember them.”

“You do,” Yaz had said flatly, and the Doctor flashed her a grin.

“Sure do,” she said. “They’re still me, you know. And as long as I remember who I was, they’re not forgotten. They help me understand who I am today.”

“Oh,” Yaz had said, though something about that bothered her. There was a question at the back of her throat, but she couldn’t quite figure out what it was, so she left it there. And then the Doctor gave a cough and changed the subject, launching into a slightly overenthusiastic description of the planet they were about to visit, so Yaz dropped it completely. And didn’t think of it again.

Until the Doctor is dead, and then she thinks of it constantly.

She thinks of all those people, and tries to imagine them, because she doesn’t really  _ know _ . She’s never seen pictures, only has the spare tidbit thrown out by the Doctor, and she grasps at those greedily. She sits at her desk and thinks them out, orders them in her mind one by one, and tries to figure out what is what and when and why.

“Oh, and the eyebrows! Eyebrows and a Scottish accent, deadly combination—”

“I had trainers like those, back when I had great hair—”

“No, that was my leather jacket phase—”

She numbers them in her mind, tries to puzzle out the people the Doctor was and who she wasn’t and what kind of things she was hiding, and it doesn’t take her long to realize that it’s nowhere near enough. Tidbits are nothing in the face of thousands of years of stories, and the more Yaz stands before them, the more she pales.

The Doctor had said she’d remembered her past lives. But now she was gone, nothing more than a memory—she grits her teeth against the word, feels the jolt in her heart—and there’s nobody to remember those past lives. 

Who can tell the Doctor’s story, when she’s not around to tell it?

Yaz wrestles with the question when she should be writing reports, sits in her police car and wonders instead of listening to the radio, and trudges home with the very same thought on her mind. When she finally quits, the question only expands to fill her entire mind, and she finds that she can’t put it down. It follows her to her home, on errands and to her room and out to the occasional bar, and just when she thinks she can’t take it anymore, she finds out that she’s not the only one.

“Do you ever wonder,” Ryan says, as he swoops a paint roller over the TARDIS doors, “About all the things the Doctor never told us?”

Yaz freezes, mid-stroke. It’s Saturday, the last one of the month, and they’re doing as they usually do; painting the TARDIS. She fades within the first week of a coat of paint, starts peeling by week two, and is flaking by week three, but they’ve kept it up this far. Something tells them all that they can’t just quit.

“I think about it sometimes,” she says carefully. “Why, what do you mean?”

Ryan shrugs. “I dunno. Just...she said she was like, three thousand years old, right? But she never told us anything. And I kind of wish she did, because…”

He trails off, and Yaz watches him swallow thickly. Then, quickly, he pushes the paint roller against the wood and begins to swoop it up and down fiercely. Determined.

“Because now nobody knows,” Yaz says quietly, and Ryan doesn’t say anything but just nods. He’d left Graham at home that day—the chill had given him a cold—and he’s always a bit more fragile when Graham is gone, Yaz has noticed. A little sadder, a little less tightly wound. Sagging, slightly.

Yaz can relate.

“I mean, we know,” she says hopefully, even though she knows it’s not much use. And sure enough, Ryan just purses his lips.

“Yeah, but almost nothing,” he says. “I mean, what? That she used to really like wearing question marks? Or—”

“I didn’t know that,” Yaz interrupts, and suddenly her heart is beating fast. “Wait a minute—when did she tell you that?”

Ryan stares, confused. Then understanding flashes in his eyes.

“When you and Graham were captured by those locust people,” he says. “She told me that, and—”

“She had a leather jacket phase,” Yaz says quickly, steps away from the TARDIS, her paintbrush falling to her side. “And she used to be Scottish. And—”

“She told me she was called a Time Lord,” Ryan interrupts, eyes glowing with sudden excitement. “She never told me what that is, but—”

“She told you,” Yaz breathes, and something splits in her chest, a thick pressure she hadn’t even realized she’d been carrying. She sucks in a heavy breath, and finds it clear. Something has changed, it occurs to her, and she’s no idea what.

“Yeah.” Ryan nods, then frowns slightly. “But I mean...what do we do with that?”

Yaz shakes her head. “I dunno.”

And she doesn’t. But that night, she sits down in her pajamas with a cup of tea, long after the rest of her family has gone to bed, and takes a piece of paper and a pen. She takes one steadying sip of tea then, with nervous precision, starts to list things. Facts, tidbits. Memories, anything she can get her hands on. All the things Ryan had told her, and all the things she remembers, and then she sits back and she stares at it and wonders what the hell she’s supposed to do with it.

She’s no idea. But the paper stares at her, both beckoning and accusing, and in it she can see the shape of the question that’s been weighing on her mind ever since that dreadful day when she’d found that welding mask.

The welding mask still sits in her room, as burnished and dirty as the day she’d found it. She can’t bear to move it, but she can’t bear to look at it, either.

“Oh, Doctor,” she whispers, and even that hurts to say. “Why didn’t you tell us?”

The paper doesn’t answer, but she reads it there anyway.

Maybe, Yaz thinks, she just didn’t have time.

————-

“Mum, I don’t want to go  _ there _ ,” she whines, but her mum just grips her hand tighter and pulls her along anyway. Beth glowers, and resists the urge to yank her hand away, even though she’s  _ nine _ and obviously too old to hold her mother’s hand.

“Beth, please,” her mother answers. Exasperation is leaking into her tone. “I told you we were going to a bookshop. You were fine with it back at the house.”

Beth pouts, because she doesn’t have an answer to this. The thing is, she loves books, and she loves bookshops—or, most of them—but when her mother had said bookshop, Beth had conjured an image of the bookshop just around the corner, which coincidentally had an ice cream shop attached to it. Beth loved that bookshop. She also loved ice cream, and she chalked her chances at winning her mother over to such a purchase as fairly high. Or at least, she had until her mother had dragged her right past the bookshop, to the end of the street.

The end of the street is where the other bookshop sits. The slightly creepy one, a little too old-fashioned, with a strange blue box sitting outside. The kind that kids don’t enter because it’s  _ creepy _ ; the woman who owns it, they would say, is a witch, and if you ask the right questions, you can actually get spellbooks.

Beth doesn’t want to confirm any of those theories. Problem is, telling her mother her worries would get her nothing more than a snort of dismissal, so Beth shuts up and pouts and, as her mother drags her inside, wonders if she’ll ever come out again.

Witches, she thinks, have been known to be unkind to children.

But the moment she enters, she realizes the place is nothing of the sort. Oh, it looks it; it’s a little musty, with plenty of thick old tomes crowding wooden bookshelves, but the woman behind the counter is definitely not a witch. For one thing, she’s wearing jeans and a t-shirt, a big star splattered across the chest, and when she sees Beth, she smiles. Beth smiles back, still a little nervous, and watches lines crinkle around the woman’s eyes. She looks a little older than Beth’s mother, with grey streaks through black hair, and dark skin run-through with lines. 

She looks kind, enough to ease some of Beth’s suspicions. 

“Nice to see you, Yasmin,” Beth’s mother says, and the woman’s smile switches to her.

“I told you, you can call me Yaz,” she says, and reaches under the counter, shuffling around for something. “My friends call me Yaz.”

Beth’s mother laughs, the polite, disinterested kind, but Beth is too busy looking around the shop to pay much attention. All the nearby books look completely harmless, enough to set her even more at ease. Old novels, they look like, and some history books.

“Mum,” she says, and wiggles her fingers impatiently in her mother’s grip, “Can I go look around?”

“Hmm?” Her mother is rummaging through her purse for something. “Where’s that order....oh, yes dear. Just don’t touch anything.”

“Sure.” Her mother releases her hand and Beth shoots off, towards the back of the store. Touching stuff is only forbidden if her mother can’t see it, she decides, and besides, now that she’s over her fear, she’s eager to see if there are actually any spellbooks. 

She doesn’t find any, but the back of the store is loads more interesting than the front. The book titles are all different languages, and Beth doesn’t know how to read a single one, but she runs her fingers over the spines anyway, and imagines how cool it would be if they were actually ancient languages, or maybe alien ones. 

She’s deep in this fantasy when she’s jolted out of it by a book which, disappointingly, is in English. Beth frowns, annoyed at its apparent commonplaceness, and glances once at the front of the store before pulling it off the shelf.

It’s big, she realizes, as it falls into her hands. In fact, she has to carry it with both hands as she goes to a nearby stool and sets herself down, then runs her fingers over the cover.

There’s no picture, only a title.  _ The Doctor _ , it reads in scripted font, and Beth wonders briefly if that’s supposed to be a person before her eyes fall to the first page, which happens to be an introduction.

_ This book could not have come about without the help of many wonderful people, among them Martha Jones, Clara Oswald, Captain Jack Harkness, Sarah Jane Smith—  _

“That’s an interesting one.”

Beth jumps, slamming the book shut, and spins around.

“Sorry!” she says to the woman, even though she doesn’t appear at all mad. In fact, she’s smiling down at her in a way that reminds Beth of the way her mother used to look at pictures of her dad after he’d left. Sort of sad, and distant. “I didn’t—I was only—”

“Oh, that’s fine.” The woman laughs, and squats down beside her. She gestures for the book, and Beth hands it to her, a little guilty. The woman cracks the book open, and her smile turns fond. “This book is meant to be read, actually. It’s an important one.”

“Really?” Beth leans over her shoulder, interest piqued. “What’s it about?”

“It’s a biography.” The woman isn’t looking at her, so she doesn’t see Beth wrinkle her nose. A  _ biography _ . They’d studied parts of some biographies in school, and they were always incredibly dull—dryer than dust in a desert. But the woman is still talking, and Beth is schooled to be polite, so she listens anyway.

“It’s about a woman I knew,” the woman says. She’s flipping through the pages, frowning slightly, as if remembering. “Well, when I say woman—oh, that doesn’t matter. She went on all these mad adventures, and I was lucky enough to go with her for a few of them. Me and some of my friends.”

“Are you in it?” Beth asks. Her interest is piqued again, and she bends over the woman’s shoulder, trying to read even though the print is tiny. She’s impressed—she’s never met somebody out of a book before.

The woman nods. “Near the end.” Her smile falters somewhat, and then it stiffens again, and she flips some pages, back to the start. “But it’s a great book. I’m afraid I can’t lend it out, though. Or sell it.”

“Oh,” Beth says. “That’s okay.”

It isn’t, a little bit, because she sort of wants to read it now. She’s a good reader, and it’s an important book apparently, and sounds a bit mad, which only adds to the allure. But the woman must sense the disappointment in her tone, for she glances up, and eyes her for a moment.

“Do you want to read it?” she asks. Beth hesitates, then nods. The woman studies her, then closes the book, but keeps it in her hands.

“You know, biographies are nonfiction,” she says. Beth nods, because  _ obviously _ . “But some of the stuff in this book is really crazy. You might not believe all of it.”

“I will,” Beth says immediately. The woman’s smile grows. 

“Well, I guess…” she cocks her head, appears to think about it. “I guess if you want to come around the shop sometimes, I can let you read it. However long you like. I just can’t lend it out, see. It’s too important.”

Beth puffs up with pride at the implication. Suddenly, the shop seems the farthest from creepy. Actually, it’s kind of homey. A little strange, but way more interesting than the one ‘round the corner. 

“I would be very careful,” she promises. “I’m good with books. I don’t dog-ear the pages.”

“I would expect nothing less,” the woman says solemnly. Carefully, she places the book back on the bookshelf. Then she stands, and brushes off her trousers. “Sorry, I told your mum I’d come find you. I think she’s in a hurry to leave.”

“Oh.” Beth makes a face, but rises to her feet, and allows the woman to lead her between the stacks. “Wait a minute, Miss…?”

“Khan,” the woman answers.

“Uh, Miss Khan. Do you still know the woman? Does she come around here?” It would be really cool, Beth thinks, to meet somebody who was the subject of a book. But the woman just glances back, and Beth catches sight of that same sad smile.

“No,” the woman replies. “She’s not around anymore. But that’s why we have a book about her. So new people can learn about her.”

“Huh.” Beth considers this, a little disappointed. “Okay. She sounds pretty cool.”

The woman glances back once more, then turns to the front.

“Oh,” she murmurs, so soft Beth can’t be really sure she’s even addressing her. “You have no idea.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, if yall have writing or art you're dying to share, you should participate in our charity fanzine!! We're accepting submissions now until November 1st, and you can read all about the process (as well as submit your piece) here: https://thirteenfanzine.tumblr.com/post/187420509449/submission-applications-are-open-for-the-next

**Author's Note:**

> >:)


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